Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are riding high on consumers’ support for handmade, fresh and local products by embracing pop-up shops, a growing trend for local small businesses.
As detailed in a new Business Report feature, pop-up stores are also referred to as pop-up shops, pop-up retail or simply a pop-up. But regardless of what you call them, the basic idea involves a small businesses setting up merchandise temporarily in the space of another well-established business or even just in a short-term location—either occupied or vacant—for a limited time.
The creative and scratch-made entrepreneur community is employing this flexible business concept across the Capital Region as a way to expand its client base and test new waters.
Take Bengals & Bandits, for example. The local vintage and retro collegiate apparel store, which has locations at LSU’s Northgate in Baton Rouge and in Lafayette, did just that when it set up a pop-up location in The Mail Bag, which is also home to Dyson House Gifts and Antiques, on Jefferson Highway.
When The Keeping Room moved out of The Mail Bag to its new location in Acadian Village, Louis Landry, the owner of The Mail Bag, was looking for something to fill the space. Around the same time, Bengals & Bandits owners Patrick Wilkerson and Eric Hedrick were exploring the idea of a pop-up location.
“They have products you can’t buy anywhere else unless you buy them from Bengals & Bandits, so having them have a pop-up store here was a good combination of two different businesses,” Landry says.
Wilkerson calls the situation a win-win for both stores.
“It gives you the opportunity to test out an area without going in with all the other overhead,” he says. “The benefit on the other side for the leasee is that they have the benefit of putting a product in their store that they wouldn’t otherwise have had the ability to put in front of their customers.”
Hedrick says one of the challenges of the pop-up model is making sure the consumers understand that at a pop-up shop, they may only be seeing a broad stroke of the product mix and not the entire breadth of inventory a business offers.
“The key piece is educating the consumer on your product mix,” he says. “We put our core line of products in the pop-up.”
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